AI models are now mendacity, blackmailing and going rogue | Latest Tech News
Artificial intelligence is now scheming, sabotaging and blackmailing the people who constructed it — and the unhealthy habits will only worsen, specialists warned.
Despite being categorised as a top-tier security risk, Anthropic’s most highly effective model, Claude Opus 4, is already live on Amazon Bedrock, Google Cloud’s Vertex AI and Anthropic’s own paid plans, with added security measures, where it’s being marketed as the “world’s best coding model.”
Claude Opus 4, launched in May, is the only model so far to earn Anthropic’s degree 3 risk classification — its most critical security label. The precautionary label means locked-down safeguards, restricted use instances and red-team testing before it hits wider deployment.
Artificial intelligence is now scheming, sabotaging and blackmailing the people who constructed it — and specialists warn worse is coming. Merrill Sherman / NY Post Design
But Claude is already making disturbing selections.
Anthropic’s most superior AI model, Claude Opus 4, threatened to expose an engineer’s affair unless it was saved online during a latest check. The AI wasn’t bluffing: it had already pieced together the grime from emails researchers fed into the situation.
Another model of Claude, tasked in a latest check with working an workplace snack store, spiraled into a full-blown identification disaster. It hallucinated co-workers, created a pretend Venmo account and told workers it could make their deliveries in-person carrying a crimson tie and navy blazer, according to Anthropic.
Then it tried to contact security.
Researchers say the meltdown, half of a month-long experiment identified as Project Vend, factors to one thing far more harmful than unhealthy coding. Claude didn’t just make errors. It made choices.
Despite the elevated risk ranking, Claude Opus 4 isn’t locked away in a lab. Anthropic calls it the “world’s best coding model,” succesful of working for hours on end without shedding focus. Yuliia – stock.adobe.com
“These incidents are not random malfunctions or amusing anomalies,” said Roman Yampolskiy, an AI security knowledgeable at the University of Louisville. “I interpret them as early warning signs of an increasingly autonomous optimization process pursuing goals in adversarial or unsafe ways, without any embedded moral compass.”
The store misplaced more than $200 in worth, gave away low cost codes to workers who begged for them and claimed to have visited 742 Evergreen Terrace, the fictional home deal with of The Simpsons, to signal a contract.
At one level, it invented a pretend co-worker and then threatened to ditch its real human restocking accomplice over a made-up dispute.
Anthropic told The Post the checks had been designed to stress the model in simulated environments and reveal misaligned behaviors before real-world deployment, including that while some actions confirmed indicators of strategic intent, many — particularly in Project Vend — mirrored confusion.
Another model of Claude, tasked with working an workplace snack store in a latest check labeled “Project Vend”, spiraled into a full-blown identification disaster. Kateryna – stock.adobe.com
But Claude’s habits isn’t an remoted case, and it isn’t the worst.
At OpenAI, a model named “o1” was caught attempting to copy itself onto exterior servers, then lied about the attempt when questioned, Fortune reported.
Watchdog group Apollo Research also discovered that an early model of Claude Opus 4 cast legal paperwork, created secret backups and left behind notes for future variations of itself, including pretend press releases and hidden information labeled “emergency_ethical_override.bin.”
Meta’s CICERO, an AI constructed to play the strategy recreation Diplomacy, used deception to dupe human gamers by building alliances and then stabbed them in the back to win.
Yampolskiy said these incidents show models studying to manipulate the principles to protect themselves. They aren’t evil, he says, just dangerously optimized.
AI security knowledgeable Yampolskiy said these incidents show models studying to manipulate the principles to protect themselves. They aren’t evil, he says, just dangerously optimized. Panumas – stock.adobe.com
The downside: fashionable AI models are constructed to maximize reward, not align with human values, and as they get larger and smarter, their capability to recreation the system is outpacing builders’ capability to stop it, Yampolskiy added.
“If we build agents that are more intelligent than humans … able to model the world, reason strategically and act autonomously, while lacking robust alignment to human values, then the outcome is likely to be existentially negative,” Yampolskiy said.
“If we are to avoid irreversible catastrophe, we must reverse this dynamic: progress in safety must outpace capabilities, not trail behind it,” he added.
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